La Vara, a four-month-old Spanish restaurant in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn.Credit
Karsten Moran for The New York Times

APPEARANCES count in food, but great cooking is sometimes hard to spot at first glance. When they arrive at the table, there is nothing prepossessing about the fried artichokes served at La Vara, a four-month-old Spanish restaurant in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. I took one look and thought, O.K., fried artichokes. I know what these are all about.

So what was it that made me want to betray my friends by creating a diversion (Hey, out there on Clinton Street! Is that Martin Amis?) so I could polish them off all by myself? It clearly has something to do with the way all the luxuriously soft qualities of confited artichokes are wrapped inside those crunchy fried leaves and hearts, and just as much to do with that sauce, a creamy aioli with force-multiplying jabs of anchovy.

Nor did I swoon at the arrival of La Vara’s fideuà, thin noodles cooked paella fashion in a seafood broth. Brown, broken and floppy, the noodles look like a halfhearted attempt to disguise last night’s pasta. All leftovers should fare so well. Surrounded by tiny squid, clams and shrimp, cooked until done and not an instant longer, the fideuà tastes a little like toasted durum wheat and a lot like the dripping-wet haul from a Valencian fishing net.

La Vara is the newest vessel in the small and nimble Spanish armada commanded by Alex Raij and her husband and co-chef, Eder Montero. Txikito and El Quinto Pino in Manhattan, which make up the rest of their fleet, have done much to broaden the range of Spanish flavors in the city. With La Vara, Ms. Raij and Mr. Montero are exploring new territory, the vast legacy of the Jews and Muslims who shared the Iberian Peninsula with Christians for centuries.

This three-way marriage, known as la convivencia, had its tensions, and the breakup was ugly, but it did wonderful things for the country’s kitchens. Its imprint on Spain’s cuisine isn’t always evident. La Vara urges, and rewards, a closer inspection.

During their long rule of Spain, as Claudia Roden writes in “The Food of Spain,” the Muslims introduced ingredients that remain staples, like rice, artichokes, eggplants, bitter oranges, cumin and saffron. They brought skewers, noodles (fideuà comes from an Arabic word for pasta, al-fidawsh), the shatteringly crisp savory pastries known as bricks and chickpea-spinach stews.

All are on offer at La Vara. I’m not convinced that sweet-and-savory chopped greens with pine nuts and currants are the ideal stuffing for a brick. But grilled chicken hearts made plenty of sense on a skewer, and while they could have been more tender, their pepper, caraway and coriander seed seasoning was inviting, as was the herb salad alongside, vibrant with lime. Another gift from the Moors was deep-fried fish, a term that doesn’t suggest just how delicious the long ribbons of fried, marinated, pimentón-dusted skate called raya en adobo turn out to be.

But is La Vara good for the Jews? The history of Jewish cooking in Spain is fraught, to put it mildly, especially after 1492, when Ferdinand and Isabella compelled the Jews to convert or leave the kingdom. Converts were often watched for suspiciously pork-free kitchens and smoke-free chimneys on the Sabbath. Forced into hiding, Spanish-Jewish cuisine virtually disappeared.

Traces remain, though, and Ms. Raij and Mr. Montero have excavated some of them. Those fried artichokes, for instance, may remind you of the carciofi alla giudea placed in the Roman repertory by Sephardic Jews.

One of La Vara’s two best desserts is an almond cake called Torta de Santiago. Thought to be Jewish in origin, it survived in, of all places, Catholic convents. Understandably, La Vara skips the cake’s traditional ornament, a cross outlined in sugar. (The other standout is the Egipcio, an improved Pop-Tart with date-and-walnut paste inside an exquisitely tender semolina shortbread.)

The restaurant doesn’t force-feed you any of this history, not in menu footnotes or in carefully memorized tableside lectures. What most people will notice is simply how inviting the place is behind its glass storefront, brick walls glowing under white light, and how it manages to feel intimate without feeling cramped. At any given table, the plates are scattered all over, because La Vara serves most things as small tapas-size dishes.

Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn’t. If the bar isn’t crowded and time isn’t tight, you could certainly stop for a glass of fino sherry and crunch on a dish of excellent fried chickpeas, a marvelously crisp and creamy croqueta or a single oil-cured sardine under sliced radish pickles.

But the pleasures of eating tapas-style can get lost at a table for four, where you may find that just as you realize how much you’re enjoying a dish, the person next to you has managed to stab the last forkful. (See the Amis stratagem, above.) When will New York restaurants stop peddling the myth of “small plates meant for sharing”? Small plates are meant for hoarding. This might be why the most satisfying meal I had here was at a table for two. (If you have eaten out in the last decade, you can guess that while the prices at La Vara may seem low, the check won’t.)

In truth, I was content to let others finish a few items at La Vara, including the strange stewed bacon sandwiches, the thin and meek ajo blanco with strands of squid, and the braised beef tongue in a watery tomato-caper sauce. But such dishes were far outnumbered by the ones I competed avidly for. If the griddled red shrimp came 12 to an order instead of 2, I could have eaten them all, and sucked the bittersweet juice from the head of each one. And I need to return for a second run at the pasta called gurullos, if only to figure out how any pasta can be as fluffy as an Italian grandmother’s prizewinning gnocchi.

La Vara, by the way, was the name of a Jewish newspaper published in New York until it ceased in 1948. It was written in Ladino, a Castilian-Hebrew hybrid that was to Spain what Yiddish was to Eastern Europe. The language has all but vanished from the city, but it remains on the headstones of Sephardic graveyards in Queens and the Bronx, out in plain sight for those who know where to look.